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In addition to the release of the generally available public release, IBM has announced for-pay software support help to accompany its Lotus Symphony office productivity software.  Lotus Symphony is a direct competitor to the market leading Microsoft Office suite, and joins a legion of alternative productivity suites, including Google Apps.  The software itself, which includes full-feature word processing, presentation design, and spreadsheet application, is free, though many companies have expressed concerns about the long term sustainability of free software.  IBM’s move lends credence to Symphony as a genuine alternative, by following a more conventional for-profit business model in the deliver of software.

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Want to use MS Office to open and save ODF spreadsheets, word processing, and presentation documents, but don’t want to wait until 2009 to do it?  Sun has got you covered.  Microsoft recently announced that native ODF support would be coming to its popular Office 2007 productivity suite with the release of Service Pack 2, currently scheduled for early to mid 2009.  Users who either can not or do not wish to wait that long have an alternative though, and it comes from one of Microsoft’s chief competitors in the market for office productivity software: Sun Microsystems.

Sun has taken the open source OpenOffice suite of productivity applications, and offers a branded version called StarOffice 8.  The productivity suite, which includes word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, and database capabilities (think Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, and Access) costs far less than typical licenses for MS Office, and offers nearly the same functionality.  Major advantages include full compatibility with both ODF and popular MS Office formats, including .doc/.odt, .xls/.ods, and .ppt/.odp, as well as significant cost savings versus a typical installation of MS Office.

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The good news:  MIcrosoft has announced its flagship Office productivity software will gain support for more open formats, including PDF v1.5, PDF/A (the ISO standard for archival PDFs), and ODF v1.1. 

The bad news: Users will have to wait until 2009 and Service Pack 2 to get it.

In a press release, MS detailed the intention to increase the interoperability of Office 2007, and reaffirmed the commitment to delivering ODF support for older versions of Office through support of the OpenXML-ODF open source translator project.  This move comes after Microsoft’s recent success in establishing its own Open Office XML (OOXML) as an ISO standard, and provides significant backing to Microsoft’s pledged support of interoperability.  The media spin that Microsoft is using goes something like this: Step 1: Innovate.  Step 2: Create partner opportunities.  Step 3: Profit.  But is this really a move for greater compatibility, or simply a move to maintain dominance?

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